React.js, CouchDB, Node.js, de-coupling Drupal; if any of that sounds cool to you, then this is the podcast for you. Kyle Hofmeyer gathered a several Lullabots together, who helped create the new lullabot.com, to learn what kind of wizardry was used to make this thing purr like a happy kitten. Jared Ponchot talks about the advantages this process provided for him and his design team. Sally Young talks about the guts of the site and the magic that went in to making this de-coupled Drupal site a success. We are also joined by Kris Bulman, Wes Ruvalcaba, and Betty Tran as they share their experience building the site. From front-end advantages to lazyboyDB, this podcast has it all.

It's been nearly 10 years since we launched our first company website at lullabot.com. During that time, we've done five full redesigns of the site. The company has grown from two people to 62. We've expanded from a small Drupal consulting and education company to a full-service agency with a complete Design team, dedicated front-end developers, and of course, the expert Drupal back-end development which has always been our foundation.

As we've grown, our site design has reflected our focus and skills. The first site that Matt and I put together back in 2005 was intentionally sparse – not exactly beautiful, but functional and simple to maintain for just 2 or 3 people. As we hired talented designers and skilled front-end developers, site redesigns became more complex. In 2010, we split our Drupal education services into Drupalize.Me and the main focus of lullabot.com became our client services work, showcasing our design and development projects and sharing insights from our team.

Revving up the new Lullabot.com

The newest iteration of Lullabot.com is our most ambitious to date. As with most of our client engagements, the project started with research. Our Design team interviewed existing and potential clients, site visitors, and the Lullabot team to understand how people were using our site – what they wanted to get out of it, and why they visited. Our team distilled all they'd learned into goals and early wireframes for the site. They then worked with our Development staff to try to come up with the most flexible way of achieving these goals so that we could have full control of the site in ways that Drupal often doesn't afford. They wanted full <html> to </html> blue-sky design of any arbitrary page on the site without losing Drupal's amazing content management capabilities.

The technical team settled on a decoupled, isomorphic approach using Facebook's React, Node.js, CouchDB (a noSQL database) and Drupal as the backend CMS.

Content management is what Drupal does best, and this happens through a purpose-built subsite where the Lullabot team can login and post articles, podcasts, and manage their bios. Drupal pushes content into CouchDB, which exposes a REST API for React to consume. React is an isomorphic library (its code can run both in the server and the client), which means that when a visitor first visits the site, they receive the html of the entire page. Then, the rest of the navigation happens client-side, updating just the parts of the page which are different from the current one. Furthermore, React is written to be completely backward compatible with older browsers.

Our clients are often in need of API-driven native mobile apps, television-based apps, and content ingestion on connected devices. We've implemented these things in less holistic ways with our clients in the past. But the new Lullabot.com gave us a chance to experiment with some methodologies that weren't quite tried-and-tested enough to recommend to our clients. But now that we've had a chance to see the type of flexibility they give us on lullabot.com, we'll be adding this to the array of architectural strategies that we can consider for our clients in the future.

Look ma, no hands!

The results are amazing; high-speed, high-performance, and superlative flexibility. In layman's terms, this means our Design and Front-end people can go crazy – implementing blue-sky ideas without the usual Drupal markup constraints. The new site is fully responsive. Articles and portfolio work pages can have giant, dazzling, full browser-height background images or videos. Articles have big text that is easy to read on any scale from large desktop monitors to the smallest phone screens. Furthermore, we did everything with an eye toward blazing fast page loads. We omitted jQuery, trading convenience in the development process for speedy page loads. Then we looked at every http request, every image, every library to make sure our website was as snappy on an older smartphone as it was on the desktop. Best of all, we off-loaded much of the heavy lifting to the client-side with React.

Over the coming months, we will be writing a series of articles and doing a few podcasts talking about different aspects of the new site. Please subscribe to the Lullabot email newsletter below and you'll be the first to know when new articles are published.

Panels curator provides content administration tools for panels panes groups. This allows you to group panes into groups and remove items from those buckets to limit the panes that are available.

This module allows you to create and manage panels 'groups', which can be configured so that only specific panels/panes/views/etc are available to the content editors. This greatly increases the ease of use for the In-Place editor and back-end panels admin interface.

I've been working with Drupal 8 for a long time, keeping Honeypot and some other modules up to date, and doing some dry-runs of migrating a few smaller sites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, just to hone my D8 familiarity.

I finally launched a 'for real' Drupal 8 site, which is currently running on Drupal 8 HEAD—on a cluster of Raspberry Pi 2 computers in my basement! You can view the site at http://www.pidramble.com/, and I've already started posting some articles about running Drupal 8 on the servers, how I built the cluster, some of the limitations of at-home webhosting, etc.

Hi, drupalers! Enjoying your summer? Time to make plans for your awesome autumn! We have checked the forecasts, analyzed the position of stars, written php scripts to define the luckiest date and place for you. Here you go, the answer is: October 17-18, Lviv Euro DrupalCamp. The time and place cannot be changed ;)

Brain-controlled prostheses sample a few hundred neurons to estimate motor commands that involve millions of neurons. Sampling errors can reduce the precision and speed of thought-controlled keypads. A new technique can analyze this sample and make dozens of corrective adjustments in the blink of an eye to make thought-controlled cursors more precise.

If you've ever wondered what happens in the bootstrap process, or how Drupal's Form API works, or how exactly Drupal figures out which menu callback to run per page request, then this is the place to go.

It's just getting started, and so far I've only gone through the bootstrap process and the menu router, but I'm having a great time and learning a ton, so I expect to fill it up quickly.

Who could benefit from this?

Any developer who has ever wondered how Drupal works could get some value out of reading this. You'll need to know at least a little about Drupal development to understand parts (for example, I don't explain what hook_menu() is when talking about the menu router), but you shouldn't need to be an expert or anything.

If you feel like that describes you, but you don't understand a part, please let me know so that I can make it more approachable.

Want to help?

If you're interested in helping out, the best thing to do would be to keep an eye on the repo and proofread or review things as they're written.

Pull requests are also greatly appreciated, whether you want to fix a typo or submit a whole new chapter.

Or, if nothing else, just let me know if you like this idea! Knowing that this could be helpful to people besides just me is a huge motivational boost to keep things moving.

What's the end game?

I don't know. I could see this staying on GitHub forever, or being published on Leanpub, or ending up as a blog series.

Any suggestions?

Why Drupal 7? What about Drupal 8?

I chose Drupal 7 because it still has a pretty long shelf life left. Drupal 8 Deconstructed definitely needs to be written though, and I'd love to dive into that after 7 is complete.

What about contrib?

I would love to take apart some of the more commonly used contrib modules like Views, CTools, Panels, Webform, Pathauto, etc., as well, but one step at a time!

We met again today to discuss critical issues blocking Drupal 8's release (candidate). (See all prior recordings). Here is the recording of the meeting video and chat from today in the hope that it helps more than just those who were on the meeting:

Game writer and longtime GDC speaker Evan Skolnick shares an excerpt (including previously unpublished content) from his recent book, Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know About Narrative Techniques.

JOIN THE AS IF COLLECTIVE on PATREON

The As If Collective is a network of roleplayers, gamers, GMs, Game Designers, artists and neophiles interested in exploring and contributing to experimental applications of narrative engineering. Every month I do 2-4 Releases: each is a minigame, a subsystem, an adventure, a table/chart, a form/sheet, or a web-based tool which will be of interest to Roleplayers, Storygamers and Interactive Fictioneers. As a member of the Collective, you get early access to all of these works in both draft and final form, with the added knowledge that you helped make them happen.Click Here.